In the Guise of Gods and Heroes

The Roman practice of adding portrait heads to the characters on mythological sarcophagi is well known. These faces with their individualised features and period hairstyles gaze out at us from the pages of handbooks and catalogues, giving a vivid impression of the way that Roman lives and deaths could be directly equated with the fates of mythological figures. Yet this very ubiquity begs a question: just how representative of the larger category of Roman mythological sarcophagi are the chests with portrait heads? The aim of this paper is to conduct a close analysis of mythological sarcophagi with portrait heads, to look at what the presence of portraits adds to the mythological scenes and to ask whether they should be seen as simply intensifying the message of a mythological scene or of altering and nuancing it in a particular way

Art · Art history · Literature · Mythology · Portrait · Archaeology and Historical Studies · Classical Antiquity Studies · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome

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